It is not too surprising that Ubuntu came in first in DesktopLinux.com's 2007 Desktop Linux Market Survey, or that Firefox was the topmost browser by far. More interesting is that for the first time ever in the site's annual surveys, GNOME surpassed KDE among desktop environments (45% over 35%), with Xfce a solid third (8%).

Absolutely. I noticed this as well. Gnome and KDE were neck and neck, and then suddenly almost 10,000 votes were added in favour of Gnome and OpenSUSE within a day. There's no way those are legit.

Maybe that was the day when the German newsticker "Heise" had a report about this ongoing survey on their front page. German home users are mostly OpenSuse, and OpenSuse defaults to Gnome. So this would be an expected result.